Cognition, 50 (1994) 171-188 OOlO-0277/94/$07.00 0 1994 - Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. Young children’s naive theory of biology Giyoo Hatano*.“, Kayoko Inagakib “Faculty of Liberal Arts, Dokkyo University, Soka, Saitama 340, Japan hSchool of Education, Chiba University, Chiba 263, Japan Abstract This article aimed at investigating the nature of young children’s naive theory of biology by reviewing a large number of studies conducted in our laboratories. More specifically, we tried to answer the following five critical questions. What com- ponents does young children’s knowledge system for biological phenomena (or naive biology) have? What functions does it have in childrenS lives? How is it acquired in ontogenesis? How does its early version change as children grow older? Is it universal across cultures and through history? We propose that young children’s biological knowledge system has at least three components, that is, knowledge needed to specify the target objects of biology, ways of inferring attributes or behaviors of biological kinds, and a non-intentional causal explanat- ory framework, and that these three constitute a form of biology, which is adaptive in children’s lives. We also claim that the core of naive biology is acquired based on specific cognitive constraints as well as the general mechanism of personification and the resultant vitalistic causality, but it is differently instantiated and elaborated through activity-based experiences in the surrounding culture. Introduction A growing number of cognitive developmentalists have come to agree that young children possess “theories” about selected aspects of the world (Wellman & Gelman, 1992). This conceptualization is a distinct departure from the Piagetian position. which assumed young children to be preoperational and thus *Corresponding author. SSDI 0010-0277(93)00592-U
Young Children's Naive Theory of Biology - have you ever wondered whether you should impose scientific facts in the classroom even before listening to what children think or assume of the world around them? Shouldn't we try to find out how they naively experience the world around them before telling that this is exact how the world works - maybe their own naivety can provide important insight into how people experience the world.
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Cognition, 50 (1994) 171-188 OOlO-0277/94/$07.00 0 1994 - Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
Young children’s naive theory of biology
Giyoo Hatano*.“, Kayoko Inagakib
“Faculty of Liberal Arts, Dokkyo University, Soka, Saitama 340, Japan hSchool of Education, Chiba University, Chiba 263, Japan
Abstract
This article aimed at investigating the nature of young children’s naive theory of biology by reviewing a large number of studies conducted in our laboratories. More specifically, we tried to answer the following five critical questions. What com- ponents does young children’s knowledge system for biological phenomena (or naive biology) have? What functions does it have in childrenS lives? How is it acquired in ontogenesis? How does its early version change as children grow older? Is it universal across cultures and through history? We propose that young children’s biological knowledge system has at least three components, that is, knowledge needed to specify the target objects of biology, ways of inferring attributes or behaviors of biological kinds, and a non-intentional causal explanat- ory framework, and that these three constitute a form of biology, which is adaptive in children’s lives. We also claim that the core of naive biology is acquired based on specific cognitive constraints as well as the general mechanism of personification and the resultant vitalistic causality, but it is differently instantiated and elaborated through activity-based experiences in the surrounding culture.
Introduction
A growing number of cognitive developmentalists have come to agree that
young children possess “theories” about selected aspects of the world (Wellman
& Gelman, 1992). This conceptualization is a distinct departure from the
Piagetian position. which assumed young children to be preoperational and thus
*Corresponding author.
SSDI 0010-0277(93)00592-U
172 G. Hatano, K. lnuguki I Cognition 50 (1994) 171-1XX
incapable of offering more or less plausible explanations in any domain, because
the term “theories” means coherent bodies of knowledge that involve causal
explanatory understanding. How similar young children’s theories arc to theories
scientists have is still an open question, but the former certainly have something
more than a collection of facts and/or procedures to obtain desired results (Kuhn,
1989).
An important qualification here is “selected aspects of”. In other words, young
children arc assumed to possess theories only in a few selected domains, where
innate or early cognitive constraints work. Carey (1987) suggest that thcrc arc a
dozen or so such domains. It is generally agreed that naive physics and naive
psychology are included among them. What else? Wcllman and Gelman (1992)
take biology as the third domain. As to whether young children have acquired a
form of biology, howcvcr. there has been a debate in recent years. On one hand,
Carey (1985) claimed that children before around age IO make predictions and
explanations for biological phenomena based on intuitive psychology (i.e.,
intentional causality). According to her, young children lack the mind-body
distinction, more specifically, do not recognize that our bodily functions are
independent of our intention nor that biological processes which produce growth
or death are autonomous. On the other hand, a number of recent studies have
suggested that children possess biological knowledge at much earlier ages than
Carey claimed. Some developmentalists (e.g., Hatano & Inagaki, 1987) have
asserted that the differentiation between psychology and biology occurs, if it does,
much earlier than Carey (198.5) assumed. Others have proposed that biological
phenomena are conceptualized differently from other phenomena from the
beginning (e.g., Keil, 1992).
A few other candidate theories young children may possess are theory of
Brewer, l9Y2), and theory of society (e.g., Furth, lY80). Nonetheless, none of
these has been widely accepted as an important domain, nor researched cxtcn-
sivcly, at least compared with the “big three”.
Whichever aspects of the world young children have theories about. exact
characterizations of these theories require further studies. Among others, the
following questions seem critical. What components does each theory have? What
functions does it have in children’s lives? How is it acquired in ontogenesis? How
does its early version change as children grow older? Is it universal across cultures
and through history‘?
In what follows. we would like to offer our tentative answers to these
questions as to naive biology, based on a large amount of data collected by
our associates and ourselves. Because of the limited space available. we will
refer to studies conducted in other laboratories only when they are highly rcle-
vant.
G. Hatano, K. Inagaki I Cognition 50 (1994) 171-188 173
Components of young children’s biological knowledge
We are convinced that the body of knowledge which young children possess
about biological phenomena (e.g., behavior of animals and plants needed for
individual survival; bodily process; reproduction and inheritance of properties to
offspring) has at least three components, and believe that these three constitute a
naive biology (Inagaki, 1993b). The first is knowledge enabling one to specify
objects to which biology is applicable; in other words, knowledge about the
living-non-living distinction, and also about the mind-body distinction. The
second is a mode of inference which can produce consistent and reasonable
predictions for attributes or behaviors of biological kinds. The third is a non-
intentional causal explanatory framework for behaviors needed for individual
survival and bodily processes. These components correspond respectively to the
three features that Wellman (1990) lists in characterizing framework theories:
ontological distinctions, coherence, and a causal-explanatory framework.
Animate-inanimate and mind-body distinctions
An increasing number of recent studies have revealed that young children have
the animate-inanimate distinction. More specifically, preschool children can
distinguish animals from inanimate objects by attending to some salient distinctive
features, for example animals’ ability to perform autonomous movements (e.g..
Gelman, 1990). Though only a small number of studies have dealt with plants as
living things, they have also indicated that young children recognize plants as
distinct from non-living things in some respects. For example, children before age
6 distinguish plants and animals from non-living things in terms of growth, that is,
changes in size as time goes by (Inagaki, 1993a). In this study, which is an
extension of that of Rosengren, Gelman, Kalish, and McCormick (1991), which
investigated children’s differentiation between animals and artifacts in terms of
growth, children of ages 4-6 were presented with a picture of a flower’s bud (or a
new artifact or a young animal) as the standard stimulus picture, and were then
asked to choose which of two other pictures would represent the same plant (or
artifact or animal) a few hours later and several months/years later. The children
showed “invariance” patterns (i.e., no change in size both a few hours later and
several months/years later for all the items) for artifacts, but “growth” patterns
( i.e., changes in size either/both a few hours later and several months/years later)
for plants and animals. Backscheider, Shatz, and Gelman (1993) also reported
that 4-year-olds recognize that, when damaged, both animals and plants can
regrow, whereas artifacts can be mended only by human intervention. It is clear
174 CT. Hatono. K. Inagaki I Cognition SO (1994) 171-1X8
that young children can distinguish typical animals and plants from typical
non-living things in some attributes.
That young children treat inanimate things differently from animals and plants
is not sufficient for claiming that they have an integrated category of living things.
Proof that they are aware of the commonalities between animals and plants is
needed. By asking S- and 6-year-olds whether a few examples of plants or those of
inanimate things would show similar phenomena to those we observe for animals,
Hatano and Inagaki (1994) found that a great majority of them recognized
commonalities between animals and plants in terms of feeding and growing in size
over time. and thus distinguished them from inanimate things. Moreover, many of
them justified their responses by mapping food for animals to water for plants,
such as “A tulip or a pine tree dies if we do not water it”; for growth, about
one-third of them cited the phenomenon of plants getting bigger from a seed or a
bud, and one-fifth of them by referring to watering as corresponding to feeding
as a condition for growth. Based on this and other related studies, we can
conclude that children are able to acquire the living-non-living distinction by
age 6.
Young children can also distinguish between the body and the mind, in other
words. biological phenomena from social or psychological ones. both of which are
observed among a subset of animate things. Springer and Keil (1989) reported
that children of ages 4-7 consider those features leading to biologically functional
consequences for animals to be inherited, while other sorts of features, such as
those leading to social or psychological consequences, to be not. Siegal (1988)
indicated that children of ages 4-8 recognize that illness is caused not by moral
but by medical factors; they have substantial knowledge of contagion and
contamination as causes of illness. Inagaki and Hatano (1987) revealed that
children of 5-6 years of age recognize that the growth of living things is beyond
their intentional control. For example, a baby rabbit grows not because its owner
wants it to but because it takes food. These findings all suggest that young
children recognize the autonomous nature of biological processes.
An even more systematic study on the mind-body distinction has just been
reported by Inagaki and Hatano (1993. Experiment 1). By interviewing children
using a variety of questions. they showed that even children aged 4 and 5 already
recognize not only the differential modifiability among characteristics that are
unmodifiable by any means (c.g., gender), that are bodily and modifiable by
exercise or diet (e.g., running speed). and that are mental and modifiable by will
or monitoring (e.g.. forgetfulness), but also the independence of activities of
bodily organs (e.g., heartbeat) from a person’s intention.
Another important piece of evidence for this distinction is young children’s use
of non-intentional (or vitalistic) causality for bodily phenomena but not for
social-psychological ones; this point is discussed in a later section.
G. Hatano, K. Inagaki I Cognition 50 (1994) 171-188 175
Personification as means to make educated guesses about living things
When children do not have enough knowledge about a target animate object,
they can make an educated guess by using personification or the person analogy in
a constrained way. Young children are so familiar with humans that they can use
their knowledge about humans as a source for analogically attributing properties
to less familiar animate objects or predicting the reactions of such objects to novel
situations, but they do not use knowledge about humans indiscriminately. Our
studies (Inagaki & Hatano, 1987, 1991) confirmed such a process of constrained
personification.
In one of the studies (Inagaki & Hatano, 1991), we asked children of age 6 to
predict a grasshopper’s or tulip’s reactions to three types of novel situations: (a)
similar situations, in which a human being and the target object would behave
similarly; (b) contradictory situations, where the target object and a human would
react differently, and predictions based on the person analogy contradict chil-
dren’s specific knowledge about the target; and (c) compatible situations, where
the object and a human being would in fact react differently, but predictions
obtained through the person analogy do not seem implausible to them. Example
questions for each situation are as follows: “We usually feed a grasshopper once
or twice a day when we raise it at home. What will happen with it if we feed it 10
times a day?” (similar situation); “Suppose a woman buys a grasshopper. On her
way home she drops in at a store with this caged grasshopper. After shopping she
is about to leave the store without the grasshopper. What will the grasshopper
do?” (contradictory); “Does a grasshopper feel something if the person who has
been taking care of it daily dies? [If the subject’s answer is “Yes”] How does it
feel?” (compatible).
Results indicated that for the similar situations many of the children generated
reasonable predictions with some explanations by using person analogies, whereas
they did not give personified predictions for the contradictory situations. As
expected, they produced unreasonable predictions for the compatible situations,
where they were unable to check the plausibility of products of person analogies
because of the lack of adequate knowledge (e.g., about the relation between the
brain and feeling).
The following are example responses of a child aged 6 years 3 months: for the
“too-much-eating” question of the “similar” situation, “The grasshopper will be
dizzy and die, ‘cause the grasshopper, though it is an insect, is like a person (in
this point)“; for the “left-behind” question of the “contradictory” situation, “The
grasshopper will be picked up by someone, ‘cause it cannot open the cage.” [“Zf
someone does not pick up the cage, what will the grasshopper do?“] “The
grasshopper will just stay there.” [“Why doesn’t the grasshopper do anything? Why does it just stay there?“] “It cannot (go out of the cage and) walk, unlike a
person”; for the “caretaker’s death” question of the “compatible” situation, “The
grasshopper will feel unhappy.” This illustrates well how this child applied
knowledge about humans differentially according to the types of situations.
Generally speaking, children generate reasonable predictions. using person
analogies in a constrained way, and the person analogy may be misleading only
whet-c they lack biological knowledge to check analogy-based predictions.
Non-intentional cuusalit_v
The experimental evidence presented so far enables us to indicate that young
children have a coherently organized body of knowledge applicable to living
things. This body of knowledge can be called a theory only when a causal
explanatory framework is included in it. This concerns the third component of
their biological knowledge. Here the type of causality, intentional or non-
intentional, determines the nature of a theory. Carey (1985) claimed that. as
mentioned above, children before age 10 base their explanations of biological
phenomena on an intentional causality, because they are ignorant of physiological
mechanisms involved. On the contrary, we claim that young children before
schooling can apply a non-intentional causality in explaining biological phenom-
ena, and thus they have a form of biology which is differentiated from psy-
chology.
Young children cannot give articulated mechanical explanations when asked to
that some Japanese preschoolers extended mental properties even to inanimate
objects without movement or function, such as stones.
Hatano et al. (1993) tried to differentiate between universal and culturally
specific aspects of children’s conceptions of life and understanding of attributes of
living things, by comparing kindergarteners, 2nd- and 4th-graders from Israel,
Japan and the United States. The children were asked whether two instances each
of four object types (people, other animals, plants and inanimate objects)
possessed each of 16 attributes that included life status (being alive), unobserv-
able animal attributes (e.g., has a heart), sensory attributes (e.g., feels pain), and
attributes true of all living things (e.g., grows bigger).
The results illustrate both similarities and differences across cultures in
children’s biological understanding. Children in all cultures knew that people,
other animals, plants, and inanimate objects were different types of entities, with
different properties, and were extremely accurate regarding humans, somewhat
less accurate regarding other animals and inanimate objects, and least accurate
regarding plants. At the same time, as predicted from cultural analyses, Israeli
children were considerably more likely not to attribute to plants properties that
are shared by all living things, whereas Japanese children, whose overall accuracy
was comparable to the Israeli, were considerably more likely to attribute to
inanimate objects properties that are unique to living things.
These differences are especially interesting because they suggest that children’s
naive biology is influenced by beliefs within the culture where they grow up.
Consider why Japanese children might be more likely than children in the United
States or Israel to view plants or inanimate objects as alive and having attributes
of living things. Japanese culture includes a belief that plants are much like
human beings. This attitude is represented by the Buddhist idea that even a tree
or blade of grass has a mind. In Japanese folk psychology, even inanimate objects
are sometimes considered to have minds. For example, it is at least not a silly idea
for Japanese to assign life or divinity not only to plants but also to inanimate
objects, especially big or old ones. In addition, linguistic factors seem to influence
Japanese children’s attributional judgements. The kanji (Chinese character)
representing it has a prototypal meaning of “fresh” or “perishable” as well as
1X6 G. Hatano. K. lnagaki I Cognition SO (1904) 171-l&%
“alive”. Therefore, this kanji can be applied to cake, wine. sauce, and other
perishable goods.
Similar features of culture and language may account for Israeli children being
less apt than American or Japanese children to attribute to plants life status and
properties of living things. Stavy and Wax (1989) suggested that within the Israeli
culture plants are regarded as very different from humans and other animals in
their life status. This cultural attitude parallels that of a biblical passage (Genesis
1: 30). well known to Israeli students. indicating that plants were created as food
for living things including animals, birds and insects. Adding to. or perhaps
reflecting, their cultural beliefs, the Hebrew word for “animal” is very close to
that for “living” and”alive”. In contrast the word for *‘plant” has no obvious
relation to such terms (Stavy & Wax, 1989).
How culture influences the development of biological understanding has yet to
be studied. Parents, schools and mass media may serve to transmit cultural
beliefs. For example, Japanese parents may communicate the attitude through
their actions toward plants and divine inanimate objects, though they do not
usually tell their children this explicitly. Culture may provide children with
opportunities to engage in activities that lead them to construct some particular
biological understanding, as in the case of children raising goldfish (Hatano &
Inagaki. 1992; Inagaki. 199Oa).
Postscript
Since Carey (19SS), young children’s naive biology has been an exciting topic
for research in cognitive development. As more and more ambitious researchers
have joined to study it, not only has a richer database been built and finer
conceptualizations offered about this specific issue. but also, through attempts to
answer questions like the ones discussed so far in this article, a better understand-
ing of fundamental issues in the developmental studies on cognition, like the
nature of domains, theories, constraints, etc., has been achieved.
It will probably be a popular topic for the coming several years. and research
questions about naive biology can be better answered and/or better rephrased.
What is urgently needed now is (a) to integrate nativistic and cultural accounts of
acquisition and change in naive biology, and (b) to find commonalities and
differences between naive biology and other major theories of the world
possessed by young children (Hatano, 1990).
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